It's guns galore as US bites the bullet

Women are leading a swing in favour of gun ownership, writes Ken Wells in New York.

December 11, 2011 — 3.00am

Robin Natanel picks up a compact black pistol, barrel pointed down range. Gripping the gun with both hands, left foot forward, she raises the semi-automatic and methodically squeezes off five shots. The first one creases the left edge of a red bull's-eye on a target 7.5 metres away. The four others paint a 7.5-centimetre pattern around the first. If the target were a person's head or heart, he would probably be dead.

Natanel is a Buddhist, a self-avowed ''spiritual person,'' a 53-year-old divorcee who lives alone in a liberal-leaning suburb near Boston. She is 153 centimetres and has blonde hair, dark eyes, a ready smile and a soothing voice, with a hint of Boston brogue. She's a Tai Chi instructor who in classes invokes the benefits of meditation. And at least twice a month, she takes her German-made Walther PK380 to a shooting range and blazes away.

Shifting demographics ... an image from the documentary A Girl and Her Gun.

Two years ago, an ex-boyfriend broke into her house when she wasn't home. The police advised a restraining order. Instead, she bought pepper spray and programmed the local police number on her cell phone's speed dial. ''I was constantly terrified for my safety,'' she says.

Ultimately, she got the Walther, joining a confederacy of people who might once have been counted on in the main to be anti-handgun - women, liberals, gays, college students. They are part of a national story: domestic handgun production and imports more than doubled over four years to about 4.6 million in 2009, according to the National Shooting Sports Foundation, a gun-industry trade group.

The surge has been propelled by shifting politics and demographics that have made it easier and more acceptable than at any time in

75 years for Americans to buy and carry pistols. Post-September 11 fears also seem to be a factor, as has been the relentless pro-gun politicking of the National Rifle Association and marketing, particularly to women, by handgun manufacturers. Events like the fatal shootings on Thursday on the Virginia Tech University campus reinforce a feeling that the world is an unsafe place, even as violent US crime rates fall.

Natanel had no difficulty purchasing the Walther, a brand favoured by movie superspy James Bond, nor locating experts to train her. Her circumstances won her a conceal-carry permit in a state with tough gun-control laws. Her friends have been broadminded about her conversion.

''I had never considered a gun,'' Natanel says. ''I thought they were scary. I wanted nothing to do with them. I didn't think anyone should have them.''

"Like shoe-shopping" ... gun ownership among American women has surged in recent years.

Twenty years ago, 76 per cent of women felt that way about handguns, and 68 per cent of all people in the US were wary enough of firearms of any kind to tell Gallup pollsters that they backed laws more strictly limiting their sale. Then what Gallup calls ''a clear societal change'' began.

In October, a Gallup poll found record-low support for a handgun ban - at 26 per cent among all, and 31 per cent among women. The poll, which has tracked gun attitudes since 1959, documented a record-low 43 per cent who favour making it more difficult to acquire guns. Forty-seven per cent said someone in the household owned at least one gun, the highest reading in 18 years.

The growing acceptance of guns echoes a transformation in the politics of weapons. In 1987, Florida joined a handful of states that by law or tradition allowed people to carry hidden guns; now Illinois is the sole conceal-carry holdout, and the US House of Representatives last month sent to the Senate a bill advocated by the NRA that would require those that issue concealed gun permits to recognise licences from other states.

In decades past, mass shootings, such as the rampage that killed six and wounded the Democratic US Representative Gabrielle Giffords of Arizona in January, provided a potent rallying cry for the anti-gun movement. These days, pro-gun forces are as likely to parade them as evidence that citizens need to arm themselves against attacks that the authorities are often helpless to prevent. Students for Concealed Carry on Campus, which claims 45,000 adherents on Facebook, sprang up in response to the 2007 Virginia Tech shootings.

''Post-9/11, the thinking of more and more people is that, when push comes to shove, I need to be more responsible for my safety,'' says Peggy Tartaro, executive editor of Women & Guns, a magazine published by the pro-gun group Second Amendment Foundation.

At the same time, the conceal-carry movement has gained momentum, in part because the dire predictions of anti-gun groups in the early years of the fight - that carriers of hidden guns would deploy them to settle disputes over road rage and the like - haven't materialised.

The advent of the 24/7 news cycle and its steady thrum on violent crimes may also be helping to drive people to handguns.

While middle-aged white men own the most handguns of any demographic segment, according to federal data, other groups are arming up. Besides Students for Concealed Carry on Campus, there are the Pink Pistols, Mothers Arms, Jews for the Preservation of Firearms Ownership, the Second Amendment Sisters, the Women's Firearm Network and the International Defensive Pistol Association, among others. Their influence may be outsized in gaining converts as they set up Facebook pages, churn out blogs and post recruiting videos on YouTube.

The public face of the 11-year-old Pink Pistols, which claims 1500 members across 29 chapters, is Nicki Stallard, a 52-year-old medical technician who has a Colt .45 and a conceal-carry permit. Stallard, who had a sex-change operation in 2007, recruits under the group's motto, ''Armed gays don't get bashed''.

Those Americans who have acquired handguns for protection are living with ''serious delusions'', says Caroline Brewer, a spokeswoman for the Brady Campaign to Prevent Gun Violence. She contends that few are trained rigorously enough to deploy their weapons in the shock and heat of an attack, that they'll shoot innocent bystanders, that more times than not their firearms will be turned against them.

Over lunch at a Friendly's restaurant in Springfield, Massachusetts, Robin Natanel marvels at her changed attitudes. A half-hour earlier, she was browsing the Smith & Wesson retail store and, she says, ''drooling over guns - it's like shoe-shopping to me now''.

She was considering a smaller pistol because she'd become enamoured of a new conceal-carry holster called the Flashbang that attaches to the underwire of a bra. The wearer simply pulls up her blouse or T-shirt and with a single swipe downward can free the gun and fire, hence the archly descriptive name. The Walther, she says, ''is just too big to fit the Flashbang''.

The topic turns serious. Natanel recalls the October 12 shooting rampage in Southern California in which eight people died. ''If people couldn't get guns at all, yes, maybe that would have prevented the shooting. But that's not the world we live in.

''I wake up every day saying, 'Please, I never want to shoot.' But make no mistake about it - you try to hurt me and you're done.''